Institute for the Study of Labor

About: Institute for the Study of Labor is a nonprofit organization based out in Bonn, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Wage & Unemployment. The organization has 2039 authors who have published 13475 publications receiving 439376 citations.

Wage Gains Associated with Height as a Form of Health Human Capital

Abstract: Height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status. Height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown. Height is determined by genetic make up and realized in part through satisfactory nutrition and health-related care and conditions. Alternative instrumental variables (IV) are explored which proxy price and income constraints which are expected to influence the latter reproducible human capital investments in height. I report OLS and IV estimates of the partial effect of height on log hourly wages in recent national surveys from three countries: Ghana, Brazil and the United States. I conclude that the human capital productivity effect of height estimated by parent education IVs in the US and Ghana are many times larger than the OLS estimates, and in Ghana and Brazil the regional price IVs estimates also imply a substantially larger human capital wage effects of height compared with the OLS estimates. The OLS estimates of height effects on wages are dominated by the genetic variation in height, and appear to understate substantially the human capital returns to health and nutrition inputs which increase adult height.

Credit Programs for the Poor and the Health Status of Children in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract: The impact of participation in group-based credit programs, by gender of participant, on the health status of children by gender in rural Bangladesh is investigated. These credit programs are well suited to studies of how gender-specific resources alter intra-household allocations because they induce differential participation by gender. Women's credit is found to have a large and statistically significant impact on two of three measures of the healthiness of both boy and girl children. Credit provided to men has no statistically significant impact and the null hypothesis of equal credit effects by gender of participant is rejected.

Women, War and Wages: The Effect of Female Labor Supply on the Wage Structure at Mid-Century

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of increased female labor supply on the labor market. To identify a source of exogenous variation in female labor supply, we exploit differences in female labor force participation before and after WWII. The War drew many women into the labor force as men left for overseas. The extent of mobilization for the War was not uniform across states, however. While in some states almost 55 percent of eligible males exited the labor market for military service, in other states the mobilization rate was just over 40 percent. We find that in states with greater mobilization of men, women worked substantially more in the immediate aftermath of the War and in 1950, though not in 1940. We interpret the differential growth in female labor force participation between 1940 and 1950 as corresponding to shifts in women's labor supply induced by the War, and use state mobilization rates as an instrument to study the consequences of greater female labor supply for the labor market. We find that greater female labor supply: (1) Leads to lower female wages; a 10 percent increase in female employment reduces female earnings by 7 to 11 percent; (2) Leads to lower male wages; a 10 percent increase in female employment reduces male earnings by 4 to 6 percent; (3) Increases the college premium and wage inequality among males generally. Our findings suggest that in the aftermath of WWII, women were closer substitutes to high school graduate and relatively low-skill males, but not to those with less than high school and the lowest skills.

Has Structural Change Contributed to a Jobless Recovery

Abstract: The current recovery has seen steady growth in output but no corresponding rise in employment. A look at layoff trends and industry job gains and losses in 2001-03 suggests that structural change - the permanent relocation of workers from some industries to others - may help explain the stalled growth in jobs.

Why Has the Natural Rate of Unemployment Increased over Time

Abstract: In 1970, when Robert Hall asked, "Why Is the Unemployment Rate So High at Full Employment?" the unemployment rate for adult men stood at 3.5 percent. That rate, which had been substantially below that level throughout the late 1960s, would climb to 4.4 percent in the recession of 1971. More recently, after the longest economic expansion of the post-war period, the unemployment rate of prime-aged men in the late 1980s settled at just below 5 percent of the labor force. What changes in the American labor market led to this apparent secular increase in the natural rate of unemployment. Twenty years later, we revisit Hall's question and turn up some new answers.